Thank you, Leslie. What an amazing partner Melanie had in you. What beautiful luck that you two found each other.
I’m Esther Kaplan, and I first met Melanie at a seder in the early ‘90s in the home of Alisa Solomon and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark, which I think was a plot to get Melanie to hire me at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which indeed she did. It was quite a fateful encounter. Melanie went on to become a dear friend, and a comrade in activism and writing — and also the Jewish mother I never had.
I wish the great writers Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich and Gloria Anzaldua were here to speak about Melanie in my stead. Melanie was dear to all of them, and Melanie carried so much of them with her. Grace’s working class voice. Adrienne’s sure-footed explorations of eroticism and anger. Gloria’s fascination with borderlands and border identities. Melanie contained multitudes.
Above all, Melanie was authentic and Melanie was brave. She bared herself. Even when she felt deep shame. She had an unbelievable ability to sit with discomfort, with embarrassment, even with horror.
I always saw a beautiful creative tension, or complementarity, in her relationship with Leslie. They both have rock solid ethics, and spines of steel. But while Leslie’s impulse, and brilliant gift, in the face of outrage is to swing into action — to mobilize the rest of us! — Melanie had the gift of steadfastly facing the horror, allowing us to sit with it, to absorb it, to truly feel it, to go to the depths.
It’s easy to get hardened, after awhile. She opened up space for us to be newly appalled by the ongoing degradations and brutality faced by the people of Gaza, or the life-constraining terror of sexual violence, of police violence. Melanie’s poems and her speeches, often written in the midst of crisis, made all of it land again, with a thud, right in the chest. I would say she kept the soul of the movement present for us.
Her authenticity. Think of her name! Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. She was raised Melanie Kaye, but when she decided to reclaim the Jewish Kantrowitz, she refused to shed that assimilationist history. The slash between Kaye and Kantrowitz — a line, a border between two ways of being, two kinds of Jewish identity, whose inheritance, for better and worse, were hers.
Unlike many people, I met Melanie first, and then encountered her writings. I was a youngster helping out in the JFREJ office and we spent a lot of time together. We’d work hard and forget to eat till we were so starving we’d have to dash out for food — and then she’d sit and experience such unadulterated pleasure in these salad bar roasted potatoes! This intense presence of hers, her ability to be in the moment, this was also part of her authenticity.
Her bravery. There’s a long overdue conversation happening now about “white fragility,” the way white people’s discomfort about acknowledging white privilege shuts down not only conversations — but social progress. Melanie was the opposite. Brave as hell. Like almost no one else I’ve ever known she could face down the terrible implications of being white in America unflinchingly. Unflinchingly.
A few of you will remember the 1990s controversy surrounding the claim by a City College professor, Leonard Jeffries, then chair of African American Studies, that Jews had financed the slave trade. You can imagine the backlash from the organized Jewish community. Melanie’s response was to organize a JFREJ forum to explore the history of Jewish involvement in slavery — to confront it. And when one participant asked, in anger, why no one had ever apologized for Jewish involvement in that wretched catastrophe, Melanie had the presence to simply do so. She didn’t waste energy explaining that her family was still back in Europe then. She just shouldered the collective responsibility and spoke. Immediately. Instinctively. She moved the dialogue forward, fearlessly. She never shut it down. She talked about “bring[ing] the past into the present.”[1]
Melanie embraced her working class identity but also wrote about the experience of shame that capitalism imposes on poverty. She had been an early organizer against domestic violence — and yet she had the guts to write openly, and searingly, about ending up in a violent relationship herself, and how she stayed in that violent relationship for years. She leaned into shame. She let it teach her. She interrogated her own experiences, her own complicity — with deep humanity, but without mercy.
Her extraordinary ability to mentor young writers and activists — I was one of them — stemmed from this bravery too. She was never threatened by generational change, by shifting social justice frameworks and priorities. She loved new language, new identities. She was curious. She believed people from different generations and ideological frameworks had enormous amounts to teach each other; she was intellectually alive and nimble. She was also alive to people’s personal and political contradictions and deeply generous about the potential for solidarity whenever or wherever it was possible.
She asked in The Issue Is Power “How to remain human”
in the face of violence and victimization, answering that it “means not only
feeling deeply but acting morally.”[2]
She modeled both for us, and still does.
[1] The Issue Is Power, p. 11
[2] Ibid.